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Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

arstechnica.com

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Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#171

Post by h2zizzle »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #120
h2zizzle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…

> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits

I tend to agree, but there's something to be said for a retribution focus taking time and energy away from problem-solving. When market turmoil hits, stand up facilities to guarantee food and healthcare access, institute a nationwide eviction moratorium, and then let what remains of the free market play out. Maybe we pursue justice by actually prosecuting corporate malfeasance this time. The opposite of 2008.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#172

Post by bwfan123 »

jfarmer wrote: post #107
ceroxylon wrote: post #49

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you". This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I a…

I've worked in tech and lived in SF for ~20 years and there's always been something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis an…

> but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment

You are positing that we are active learners whose goal is clarity of cognition and friction and cognitive-struggle is part of that. Clarity is attempting to understand the "know-how" of things.

Tech and dare I say the natural laziness inherent in us instead wants us to be zombies being fed the "know-that" as that is deemed sufficient. ie the dystopia portrayed in the matrix movie or the rote student regurgitating memes. But know-that is not the same as know-how, and know-how is evolving requiring a continuously learning agent.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#173

Post by lawlessone »

avidiax wrote: post #70
stingraycharles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence. I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to…

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed. If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop". When you go to deploy…

>I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos

Sort of a repost on my part, but the LLM's are all really good at marketing and other similar things that fool CEO's and executives. So they think it must be great at everything.

I think that's what is happening here.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#174

Post by joshstrange »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #146
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…

I think there are 2 things at play here. LLMs are, without a doubt, absolutely useful/helpful but they have shortcomings and limitations (often worth the cost of using). That said, businesses trying to add "AI" into their products have a much lower success rate than LLM-use directly.

I dislike almost every AI feature in software I use but love using LLMs.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#175

Post by tbd23 »

xnorswap wrote: post #150
Arwill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a WTF moment last week, i was writing SQL, and there was no autocomplete at all. Then a chunk of autocomplete code appeared, what looked like an SQL injection attack, with some "drop table" mixed in. The code would have not worked, it was syntactically rubbish, but still looked spooky, should have made a screenshot of it.

This is the most annoying thing, and it's even happened to Jetbrains' rider too. Some stuff that used to work well with smart autocomplete / intellisense got worse with AI based autocomplete instead, and there isn't always an easy way to switch back to the old heuristic based stuff. You can disable it entirely and get dumb autocomplete, or get the "AI powered" rubbish, but they had a very successful heuristic / stati…

The most WTF moment for me was that recent Visual Studio versions hooked up the “add missing import” quick fix suggestion to AI. The AI would spin for 5s, then delete the entire file and only leave the new import statement.

I’m sure someone on the VS team got a pat on the back for increasing AI usage but it’s infuriating that they broke a feature that worked perfectly for a decade+ without AI. Luckily there was a switch buried in settings to disable the AI integration.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#176

Post by aabajian »

fainpul wrote: post #165
gibsonsmog wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For example, I click the same button in Epic every day because Epic can't remove a tab. Maybe Copilot could learn that I do this and just...do it for me? You could solve that issue (and probably lot's of similar issues) with something like Auto Hotkey. Seems like extreme overkill to have an autonomous agent watch everything you do, so it might possibly click a button…

And in an ideal world, one could report this as a bug or improvement and get it fixed for every single user without them needing to do anything at all.

Well, it isn't every user. We use a version of Epic called Epic Radiant. It's designed for radiologists. The tab that always opens is the radiologist worklist. The thing is, we don't use that worklist for procedures (I'm an interventional radiologist). So that tab is always there, always opens first, and always shows an empty list. It can't be removed in the Radiant version of Epic.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#177

Post by ManuelKiessling »

aabajian wrote: post #148

I think MSFT really needs some validated user stories. How many users want to, "Improve my writing," "Create an image," "Understand what is changed" (e.g. recent edits), or "Visualize my data."? Those are the four use cases featured by the Microsoft 365 Copilot App ( https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ ). Conversely, I bet there are a lot of people who want AI to improve things they are already doing repeatedly. For exampl…

I think what people want in the long term is truly malleable software: https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/11/04/what-if-software-shi...

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#178

Post by zkmon »

>> The Information notes that much of Microsoft’s AI revenue comes from AI companies themselves renting cloud infrastructure rather than from traditional enterprises adopting AI tools for their own operations.

And MS spends on buying AI hardware. That's a full circle.

Re: Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas

#179

Post by eastbound »

shevy-java wrote: post #34
delfinom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.

Corruption is indeed going strong in the current corporate-controlled US group of lame actors posing as government indeed. At the least Trump is now regularly falling asleep - that's the best example that you can use any surrogate puppet and the underlying policies will still continue.

If I mention a president who was more of a general secretary of the party, taking notes of decisions taken for him by lobbies from the largest corporations, falling asleep and having incoherent speech to the point that he seems to be way past the point of stroke, I don’t think anyone will guess Trump.
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